Gliding is more common than Assimilation in Connected Speech, but a bit more difficult! Gliding is also more common than Assimilation, so you'll use this skill more often!
We define and review the differences between Connected Speech and Gliding, specifically.
I underline the importance of knowing how vowels are pronounced rather than relying on the way a word is written.
Also, I want you to think of vowels and consonants along a continuum rather than black and white categories. We have to pay attention to whether we're making one pure vowel sound (monopthong) or transitioning between two (diphthong) vowel sounds (or even more). Notice how we use the semi-vowels /y/ and /w/ to ease the transitions.
I go through 7 diphthongs, to show that you are probably already gliding vowels within words, but probably not recognizing it as a tool of Connected Speech to bridge the gap BETWEEN words. Then, I give you 3 examples of Gliding as Connected Speech.
Finally, we analyze the breakfast sentence from the last episode and see two examples of Gliding.
I don't have to tell you how difficult it is to find good accent training materials. I don't find what I'm looking for, so I make it!
In fact, I have put together a training resource using the top 500 most common words in English for you to practice the 5 most common diphthongs, plus a BONUS of 3 'R-colored diphthongs'.
Linking is a bit easier, and we will review that type of Connected Speech in the next episode!
Transcripts
E5 Gliding
Bianca: [:
It sounds more natural, less choppy in that way. So, We have connected speech. There's four kinds of connected speech. We've already talked about Assimilation. Now we're gonna talk about Gliding. After that, there's Linking, and then the very end, the most difficult probably is called Blending. And right now we're only talking about Gliding.
five letters, A E I O U, and [:
So when we look at it, you might think, oh, it's the same one, it's assimilation, it's the same sound. No, maybe it's the same letter, but it's not the same sound. And we're also including in this, what we call semi-vowels. Many people are taught when they are kids that there's vowels and consonants, end of story, black and white.
Of course that's not the case. It's very much a continuum. And we've got vowels on one end and stop consonants on the other end, meaning I'm stopping the air completely. So imagine a /k/ /k/, as in kick /k/ /k/, I'm stopping the air completely. And then I'm releasing it. That's what we can call a real end of the consonant spectrum sound, Stop Consonants.
t's what we can call a vowel.[:
After a vowel, we've got what we call semi-vowels, /y/ and /w/. Why do we call them semi-vowels? Because they're kind of getting in the area of consonant land and I'm shaping it a little more. I'm creating a little bit more of an obstruent, right. I'm causing some kind of barrier there- /y/ /w/, I'm really enclosing that space where the air can go through.
So we've got vowels and semi vowels. We write 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but we say a lot more than that, and we can divide them into what we call monopthongs, meaning one single vowel sound and diphthongs, two vowel sounds together. Clearly we're talking about diphthongs more than anything, or even tripthongs where you've got three.
nd /æ/, beet, bit, bet, and [:
What does that mean for me? Physically? Feel this with your jaw or with your tongue, or your lips, and see what's moving. If something is moving and you've got two vowels, you can call it a diphthong. And usually we have a /y/ or a /w/ in there, so diphthongs glide. That's why we call it Gliding. I'm Gliding my movement so the air can flow really nicely and usually a /y/ or a /w/ is gonna be heard as well.
, do that with me. /ei/. See [:
Next one /ou/ /ou/ boat. /au/ /au/ about feel your jaw moving. In that case, we just saw two that ended in /y/, /eiy/ and /aiy/. And then we had two that ended in /w/, /ouw/ /auw/. There's a few more common ones. There's /ɔi/ as in boy, /ɛɚ/ as in bear, and /uɚ/ as in bureau. We've got diphthongs. And if we're connecting our speech and the end of one word ends in a vowel sound and the beginning of the next word is also a vowel sound, boom.
You have gliding now [:
Three examples of gliding in connected speech. Number one ends in /i/, the next word begins in /ou/. Very old, very old. Very old. Very old. That man is very old. /iou/ /iou/. Number two, /ə/ and /æ/. I'm doing /ə/ here because a lot of the times we reduce function words to /ə/. So here I've got want to, but I'm gonna change it to want tə, wanna.
n, /ə/, /ouə/. Do you know [:
Also, your listeners are used to that. Let's go back to our example sentence from Assimilation. It's about breakfast. I ate two eggs and bacon this morning with a cup of tea. There were two examples of Gliding in there between I and ate. In this case, it's actually four vowels, /a/ /i/ /e/ /i/ /ai/ /ei/ /aiei/.
tic Markup app, totally free.[:
So today we talked about the difference between Connected Speech in general and what Gliding specifically is. The difference between a vowel and a semi vowel.
Bianca: What a monopthong versus a diphthong is. And how we're already Gliding inside of many words even though you didn't know it. And now you can take that skill and transfer it to connected speech. You can glide in your connected speech just the same way. We have three examples that we gave today and we used our same example from before about breakfast.
